The ex-cricketer turned Prime Minister of Pakistan, Imran Khan, came into power last August, when the country was in the midst of an economic crisis. Now, he is about to meet President Trump, in a bid to continue to improve Pakistan’s relationship with the USA.

He will be accompanied to the White House by Qamar Bajwa, Pakistan’s Army Chief General, where the two will discuss Pakistan’s importance in the Afghanistan War, something that the US President has acknowledged in recent public speeches. The goal of the meeting is to try and use Pakistani powers to counter the Taliban, continuing peace talks, and opening up the possibility to reach a mutual agreement.

Still in an economic crisis, Khan hopes to get the US’ backing in what is currently a scary situation for the population of Pakistan. In order to gain US support, Pakistan will be willing to supply information and support against the Taliban, who currently seem to be on the rise again, following the recent distribution of videos on Afghan National Television.

Trump, a property developer turned reality TV star, and Khan, World Cup-winning captain of Pakistan’s cricket team, both came to office after achieving fame away from politics, and the personal chemistry between the two may be decisive.

“A lot will depend on the kind of mood that President Trump and indeed Prime Minister Imran Khan find themselves in,” said Farzana Sheikh, associate fellow at the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London.

Pakistan’s military is keeping a close eye on the deal, however. Last year, the Trump Administration cut $300 million worth of military aid for Pakistan, who is still suffering from this blow. Khan believes that the mood may have changed, though,following the recent arrest of Hafiz Saeed, the alleged mastermind of a four-day militant attack on the Indian city of Mumbai in 2008. Trump welcomed this news, tweeting “After a ten year search, the so-called ‘mastermind’ of the Mumbai Terror attacks has been arrested in Pakistan. Great pressure has been exerted over the last two years to find him!”

More than 160 people were killed in the four-day militant attacks, and Saeed has been designated a terrorist by the United States and the United Nations. Khan hopes that Trump’s approval of this move will help to create a stronger bond between the two countries. In addition to this, Russia, China, and the United States all know the power that Pakistan has over Afghanistan, meaning that it could be a fundamental ally in peace negotiations. 

On the other side of the fence is India, Pakistan’s declared enemy; a war between the two countries nearly started earlier this year, due to the ongoing Kashmir conflict. India wants to closely oversee the possible deal between the US and its neighbour, as the deal could significantly impact India if the deal goes through. Whether the deal will go as expected, or will end in something yet unthought of, the game of forces in the Asian continent is beginning to change.

L'articolo Khan is Reaching Washington proviene da InsideOver.

L'articolo Chinese accuses UK of interfering in Hong Kong proviene da InsideOver.

Recent statistics are showing that the Japanese population is declining, due to the fact a large portion of the population is ageing. 

It need not be said that alongside an older population means a higher death rate, and, coupled with the fact that fewer Japanese people are having children than ever before, the death rate is surpassing the birth rate. This means that there are no people to replace those in the population after they die.

Because of this, Visa regulations have recently been relaxed, which means that migration into the country is soaring, especially from nearby countries. China has the largest number of immigrants to Japan, whereas Vietnam and South Korea have the highest percentages of their populations within the country.

There are now 2,667,000 foreigners living in Japan – an increase of about 170,000 from 12 months earlier, according to annual statistics released this month by the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications. Moreover, after five years, these foreigners now make up five percent of the whole population in Japan.

Looking back over the last thirty years, the number of migrants into Japan has increased steadily, though this has surged in the last ten years, especially. The only exception to this trend was the period of 2010 to 2011, wherein natural disasters in the form of tsunamis and earthquakes took place, which coudl hinder interest in the country for safety’s sake.

Despite this pool of new nationalities into Japan, the country’s overall population is still steadily declining. At the start of 2019, population figures stood at 124,776,364 people – or 433,239 fewer people than the previous year. It was the 10th straight year that population had decreased since the previous one, and the steepest decline since statistics were first collated in 1968.

There were 921,000 births in 2018, coming in below the one million threshold for the third consecutive year. Conversely, 1,363,564 people died, the sixth consecutive increase.

According to researchers at Tohoku University, if the population continues to decline at the current rate, the Japanese will be extinct by August 16, 3766. 

Due to labor shortages, the Japanese government is permitting more foreigners to come and work, trying to eliminate Visa stress surrounding obtaining and renewing the document as much as possible.

Most of the people who are working are students, so only stay in the country for a few years. Some return, however, and some come back with family members or friends, due to the many positive aspects of living in Japan – the transportation and the people are punctual, the culture is rich in history, and the cities are often clean and modern. 

Michael, a student in Japan who is originally from Australia, said: “There are a lot of positives to life here. It’s very safe, the people are always respectful and helpful, and the food is phenomenal – wherever I go after Japan, I always end up disappointed.”

Many of the new semi-skilled arrivals will be working in food services, cleaning, construction, agriculture, fishing, vehicle repair and operating industrial machinery, while individuals with recognized skills will be eligible for a broader range of employment. Some 345,000 working visas are expected to be issued in the next five years, but this will still not be enough to address the shortfall in certain sectors.

L'articolo Japan’s Population is Declining Beyond Repair proviene da InsideOver.

Beijing’s government is seeking support from the Eastern European states while there are some concerns with the new EU leadership being more hostile with China.

To clarify and ease the situation the Foreign Ministry of China, Mr. Wang plans to visit three states in a week, possibly to receive more support on the Belt and Road initiative. Analysts said the visit to Slovakia, Poland and Hungary is planned to aim at more collaboration in the commercial way.

In the past the plan became more difficult due to the tense relations with Germany, while recently the new top leaders are changing, making it a tricky time for Beijing.

Zhao Junjie, a China-EU relations analyst from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, a think tank affiliated with China’s State Council, said Wang’s trip could help strengthen China’s connection within Europe, as Eastern European nations sometimes feel neglected by major European countries such as Germany.

Furthermore, the newly nominated European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has warned of China’s negative impact on the European Union, which is the country’s largest trading partner. As Poland and Hungary are two key partners to the relations in Eastern Europe a bilateral agreement plan is set to take place in the area.

Long Jing, a European affairs specialist from the Shanghai Institute of International Studies, said Wang’s tour could help China expand world markets and fight against protectionism. The task is to show the counterparts that the Chinese are keen to collaborate and support a friendly and cooperative strategy.

China and Europe have long been steady trading partners, but in recent years the EU has become increasingly concerned about China’s growing footprint.

In just eight years, Chinese foreign direct investment in the EU has risen from less than US$840 million in 2008 to a record high of US$42 billion in 2016, according to Rhodium Group statistics.

On top of that China, back in 2011 signed an agreement with the states of Central and Eastern Europe, which Greece later joined and 16+1 states signed.

Poland and Hungary responses

Poland, one of the pillars of the 16+1 Initiative and a former enthusiast of closer relations with the PRC, has dramatically changed its attitude after the non-enthusiastic results. The 16+1 has not delivered economically for the majority of its participants, and its “one size fits all” model has failed to consider the specific situations of individual countries. Minor adjustments declared in the course of 16+1 summits in Budapest and Sofia are a good start but remain insufficient to satisfy the needs of China’s partners so the road for a new agreement is difficult.

Beijing’s close cooperation with Russia, and its courting of Berlin, also do not make the PRC a particularly attractive partner for Poland. Polish authorities have decided to put more focus on their bilateral ties with the United States—and with regional projects such as the Three Seas Initiative—rather than deepening cooperation with China which isn’t the priority at the moment.

However, in Budapest the Chinese Ambassador Duan Jielong says “China and Hungary have enjoyed frequent exchanges and fruitful achievements in the development of bilateral relations in such fields as politics, economy, trade, finance and humanities.” A first batch of electric buses has been produced at Chinese automaker BYD’s factory in the northern Hungarian city of Komarom, which vividly illustrated that the Belt and Road Initiative and the “16+1” cooperation mechanism have pushed China-Hungary relations to a new level, Duan said in a recent interview with Xinhua.

Hungary is the first European countries that has established and started the Belt and Road working group mechanism with China, which signified a successful joining of the China-proposed initiative with Hungary’s “opening to the East” policy, according to Duan. Therefore, the prospect of a deal looks to be much easier than the Polish ones.

L'articolo Chinese Foreign Minister Seeks European Support Over the Silk Road Initiative proviene da InsideOver.

Long ago Mr. Xi Jinping, president of the People’s Republic of China, unveiled his plan to remove and renew the recycling in China. One might expect a certain level of organisation from the most populated country in the world, but this hasn’t been the case for China so far. Plastic and glass alike was not adequately recycled. Villages surrounding larger cities are often turned into rubbish dumps, abandoned in critical states.

The concept of sorting waste is still new here, and most people do not distinguish between glass and plastic recycling waste, though a plan for this is in place for 2020. Xi Jinping has set new goals for the country’s recycling system, following the failure of a pilot waste-sorting scheme launched in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou in 2000.

On June 3^rd, China’s president stated his plans for the programme, saying that “extensive education and guidance should be carried out to make the people realize the importance and necessity of garbage sorting.” The speech has seen a spike in local recycling activity; Shanghai officials were among the first to release a local plan to implement household waste sorting, even going live on television to show residents how to recycle plastic bottles

Local authorities need time to turn the President’s words into action – in the past two years, the only real change made is an increase in the number of public bins. Some suggest that schools should introduce education on recycling to obtain more substantial results.

According to a recent study, most Chinese people don’t know what the different bins are for, while many only start to learn the difference when they travel abroad. Mrs Xu, a 29-year-old from Beijing, told national television: “I didn’t know what to do with them [the bins], as for decades, we never recycled anything. I started to understand when I moved to Japan – in every house there, there is an illustration and instructions.”

In Beijing, the problem has to be tackled soon, given that the city now creates nine million tonnes of domestic garbage a year. Most of it is simply poured into landfill sites, where the odour and the health risks are getting to worrying levels. Nowadays, about 30% of Beijing’s domestic waste is recycled, while authorities hope to increase this to 90% by 2020. In order to reach this goal, the government needs to educate people, whilst also supporting local districts in the collection of recycled waste, in order to reduce the likelihood of an inhospitable environment in the future.

L'articolo China’s New Recycling Goals for 2020 proviene da InsideOver.

At the moment we are traveling throughout Vietnam and we can see, continuously small shops with the Chinese sign and this is as the history taught us the remaining immigrants who came from the Chinese cities in the last century, following the upheaval conditions present back then.

Nowadays most of the people you find in the areas where they have moved, Philippines, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos aren’t talking highly about them and instead are becoming increasingly unpopular.

Some of the Chinese immigrants who moved here opened shops and restaurants while others became the workforce for those places. But recently the Filipino people become stressed due to the uprising prices of the properties which is also influenced by the immigrants, especially Chinese who are getting recruited by online casinos in Manila and this due to the fact that the biggest customers are the Chinese.

All proceed peacefully till last month when a gang of 5 Filipinos pointed guns to some Chinese workers outside a restaurant in Manila’s Chinatown. They pushed the workers to the ground and one of them pointed the gun to the head of one of them who said’ I thought I was going to die’ while they robbed them of all valuables they had and even shot in the air before leaving them yelling.

Migrations from China to Philippines are dated long way back and while most of them have been dealt peacefully some of them ended in ferocious fights.

In the recent years Chinese markets grew richer so fresh waves of workers and investors ventured to Nanyang which is the Chinese reference to South Asian lands. While most of the companies still don’t apply it, others appear to favor people coming from Beijing. Moreover, anxieties about Chinese workers wax and wane, depending on myriad factors such as the prevailing economic situation, the tenor of local politics and other vested interests.

Thus, in recent years, for example, trade unions in Indonesia have accused Chinese firms of spurning local jobseekers in favor of their own nationals. In Cambodia instead traditionally residents of the beach town of Sihanoukville are saying that their calm beaches are transformed into Chinese huge casinos and resorts to host the increasing demands of tourists.

But among these countries, it is most likely the Philippines that has felt the heavy and inconvenient presence of Chinese workers the most in recent years. The government is currently finalizing new rules to crack down on illegal workers, but doubts linger about the difference the measures will make for such a big amount of people.

“The problem here is that there is a lot of corruption at the Department of Labor and Employment, and also the Bureau of Immigration. If illegal Chinese workers pay off the immigration officers and the department of labor, if you multiply that by, say, 100,000 to 200,000, that’s a lot of money,” says Pilo Halaby, a former solicitor general.

He represented the Philippines when it took China to an international tribunal at The Hague over conflicting sovereignty claims in the South China Sea as we were explaining some other times, Manila won the case in 2016, but Beijing refused to accept the court’s decision.

Many maritime Southeast Asian states were ‘indigenous states’ and were less open to migrants, especially Chinese migrants. But in the age of globalization, it is impossible to halt migration as it is everywhere with such easy possibilities to travel. That resistance has remained but is now targeted at a new type of migrant – one with a different culture that has emerged from a changing China. On top of that the Philippines are heaven for Chinese nationals, which are banned from gambling back home but are building empires and are strongly advertising on social media. Salaries for this type of employment are very high compared to Philippines ones and so the protest continues in all South East Asia.

L'articolo Chinese Workers Unpopular in South-East Asia proviene da InsideOver.

After three decades there are not many people who feel free to talk about what happened in the main square of the Chinese capital of Beijing in 1989. In Tian An Men square, a great number of people protested during the morning in order to demand greater accountability from the Chinese government.

Some witnesses were there, such as Ma, there with his 6-year old son who has no memories of the massacre. Tanks soon appear in the square where more than 1000 people lost their lives. Ma continues saying ‘it was all too terrifying to be true’ who even brought his son to manifestations the following years but Ma doesn’t believe his son has any interest in politics. After all this time, close to the date of June 4th, the area around Tian An Men square uses surveillance cameras and security teams to keep check on the square night and day in order to avoid any possible reaction, even if years later most of the witnesses are no longer willing to speak out.

The younger generation instead prefers to leave this behind them, worried of the effect that any declaration, manifestation or protest would have on them- having seen the umbrella protest in Hong Kong a few years ago which ended with many people being imprisoned. Ma continues saying ‘I don’t think this topic will ever be forgotten’, he and his friends are still talking about it. The issue is that there is a gap between generations and the strong and strict surveillance from the government looks like it is working in keeping silence on the massacre.

Recently the ‘China Wall’ called after the wonder present in the far north of the country has increased the controls. Online on Wechat, the biggest social media in China all together with Qq every word connected to the 4th June is banned and the accounts are blocked and face several charges. So said, all has to be made unreal but it did happen.

A popular saying by a Shenzhen teacher says’ If you ask millennials, I can guarantee you 90% of them do not know’ and I myself can confirm this with sadness after spending two years in the country. Some Chinese dissidents have their mobile number’s ending in 8964, in rememberance of the date of the historical event, but still most young people are unaware of the efforts being made to try and remember it. Another young girl commented after a journey to Vietnam that she only realized what had happened following her trip to Hanoi when she was allowed to use YouTube for the first time in her life. When people asked her about her feelings she said ‘There was no way for me to know while in China, your family doesn’t tell you, your history teacher doesn’t tell you so there’s no way we’d know’.

Sarah Lin, a 21-year-old university student who decided to study in the United States, was willing to go to that trouble. She first learned about the crackdown from her aunt, who was a university student in Shanghai in 1989 and helped distribute fliers about the protest to try and raise awareness. Her aunt only spoke about it briefly and vaguely, but Lin looked it up herself later and found photos and testimony from people who survived the crackdown in Beijing. “I definitely felt very bad, not to mention there were some stupid comments saying they deserved this suppression,” she said. Lin said she had discussed it with her peers, but found they were not interested in revisiting that history. Some acknowledged nonchalantly that the crackdown had occurred, while others refused to believe what she said.

“They said, how do I know you’re telling me the truth, or whether these foreign journalists are telling the truth?” she said. Today, most people in Chinese Universities are trying to reach out and achieve greater prosperity in contrast with the ideological liberation of the 1980s. Many philosophers have tried to understand this and have developed many theories about it, but the main point is still that  people don’t realize that without the establishment of a constitutional democracy there’s no cage with which power can be contained. Without judicial independence, without civil society, without freedom of speech, there’s no way to gradually improve the quality of life and there will be no harmony amongst the people of China.

L'articolo The Great Amnesia in the Young Chinese Generation proviene da InsideOver.

The days are gone when Marco Polo described how long the path towards Asia was, and what he could barter during the incredible travels he accomplished at the time.

Nowadays China, the destination of his previous commercial trip is a super power, pushing to get some major deals in Europe whereas Italy and Austria are the last countries to join the big plan for the Silk Road. Having sealed important deals with Italy not long ago in terms of knowledge exchange and company development the China superpower is boosting their economy with some important giants of the Italian energy industry and metal producers and look to be ahead of the competition to bond with Europe following Brexit.

When this major event will happen, whether it is going to be in a few months or in a year’s time the entire European Union will suffer from a drastic swift of economic power hence why it is now so important to seal some international trade deals with the USA or China with the latest getting the edge recently in Europe.

The Belt and Road initiative, named BRI involves infrastructure projects around the world in an attempt – which is going greatly so far seeing their economy growth during the last term – will be even more positive after their new deals will fall in place. Lately Austria is also getting involved, with the joy of the government able to seal up to 30 deals in the commercial plan with the Chinese government.

Geographically and strategically located in a very favorable position Trieste will be the starting point of the Silk Road whereas the Austrian and Prussia old Empires are involved as a natural bridge between the old continent and the road towards Russia and later, China.

THE USA AND CHINA TRADING WAR

On the other side USA isn’t enjoying these deals and is trying to reach an agreement with the Chinese government while a potentially dangerous trade war is taking place between the two most powerful economies in the world.

The United States are threatening tariffs on billions worth of goods in the importations from China while the government of Asia’s largest country has realized there is a gap in negotiations, as the US has many enterprises with a lot of vested interest and investments in China. If they continue to attack the Chinese, they will also have to deal with a much bigger impact in terms of American businesses operating in Chinese territory. The government has recently confirmed they will not simply sit down and watch as the US government charges them high tariffs. Instead they will hit back.

There isn’t a clear winner in this contest: the United Kingdom could boost Chinese businesses in Europe as a result of the effects of Brexit, whereas a weaker European Union market area will be more than keen to accept the Chinese economic lure. Russia, politically closer to Beijing, may be the key figure in deciding how this will end. So far they haven’t applied any charges to the US, but China turns to them when they need raw materials, which may be a turning point in the trade war between the two giants.

L'articolo The Super Power of China With the Silk Road Project proviene da InsideOver.